ART REVIEW : ‘Yokohama’: When Worlds Collide

Caucasians don’t usually think of themselves as quaint in appearance or picturesque in dress, but they can look slightly risible to other people. Take the Japanese. Take the print exhibition, “Yokohama,” currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 1859, Japan, having been cajoled by Commodore Matthew Perry, opened the formerly boggy port of Yokohama to trade with five foreign nations: the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, France and Russia. Foreigners came pouring in on steamers and clipper ships bearing goods and all manner of exotic contraptions and customs. The Japanese were fascinated. All that new technology. All those weird clothes. All those new customers .

Japanese artists got busy documenting all the strange bustles and hustle in woodblock prints that sold for pennies as throwaway mementos. Luckily some survived to become the treasures that make up this 85-work display. It’s the first half of a two-part touring show circulated from the Smithsonian Institution’s Sackler Gallery. It’s a delightful human document and a textbook of implications as to what happens when cultures collide.

Everybody gets thrown a bit.

Normally nothing is more fluid or assured than a Japanese print. The arabesque lines seem inevitable, patterning is elegant and dramatic, color both bleached and saturated like the hues of shy spring or melancholy fall.

In these works everything looks a bit starched. Foreign clothing lacked the fluidity of traditional Japanese costume. Ships and carriages were full of awkward mechanical angles compared to the trees, rivers and mountains these artists were accustomed to picturing. The net result is an art that has that slightly formal stiffness you expect when alien peoples first meet. That has its own kind of charm.

The artists tried to please their customers with depictions of their sweethearts or heroes back home. An anonymous artist showed Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite. In his version Franklin stays sensibly indoors out of the downpour and lightning. Yoshitora, in depicting the city of Washington, for some reason copied the buildings from a picture of Agra in India. Oh well, it’s hard to get everything right the first time.

The foreigners’ habits and customs were dutifully recorded. They do funny things like galloping through town on horseback. Even some of the women ride. They bake this puffy food called bread. Do the women have legs under those long skirts?

People being human, there was some fraternization. Yoshitora’s poetic scene of “The Autumn Moon at Miyozaki” shows a courtesan bowing to her companion for the evening, a Westerner in military garb. The hands-down masterpiece of this genre scenes is Yoshiiku’s “Picture of Foreigners of the Five Nations Carousing at the Gankiro.” The geishas look politely appalled at the antics of the tipsy long-noses with their walrus beards.

If the foreigners beguiled the Japanese, all the new contraptions they brought positively compelled them. Artists scrutinized the steam engine and paddle-wheel boats. The artist Unsen dissected a German battleship in a cutaway version that shows such wonders as a stable in the hold and huge cannon at the ready.

The Japanese had too much aplomb to stay addled forever by this invasion of outsiders. You see them getting their balance once more in Sadahide’s “Picture of Western Traders at Yokahama Transporting Merchandise.” Here the artist found the link back to nature by recognizing that, really, all those ships do look like big black whales.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. to Sunday. (213) 857-6000.